The iconic exhibitions that have defined Indian art

Art and design milestones that have left a deep and lasting impression

As a gallerist, I spend a great deal of my time putting up shows. Frankly, it’s a bind. You have to be part-carpenter, part-electrician, part-counsellor, part-caterer and all host. And you have to do it every six weeks, year in, year out. It’s why I salute those who pull off the art of exhibition-making with panache. Compiling a list of the greatest shows in the history of modern and contemporary Indian art runs the risk of becoming a large, unwieldy affair. The only way to cut the flab is to create some rules and then just take a cussed and opinionated stance. To me, an exhibition is great if it makes a difference to a large and engaged audience; if it directly impacts art trends and artists; or, lastly, if there is something inherent about its design that has left a deep and lasting impression.

Winding the clock right back to the post- Independence period, it’s important to credit the biggest Indian art exhibition of its kind, mounted first in London in 1947/8 (at Burlington House) and then at the Durbar Hall at Rashtrapati Bhavan, New Delhi. Called India Through The Ages, it brought together classical Indian painting and sculpture, with examples of 20th-century art made in India. It was MF Husain who claimed to have stumbled upon a visual synthesis of art from the East and West, after visiting the show. He was particularly drawn to the miniatures of the Basohli School and the Gupta-period sculptures on display.

Within a year of having seen India Through The Ages, Husain was to participate in exhibitions in Bombay with the influential Progressive Artists Group (PAG), which included future stars such as SH Raza and FN Souza. In their case, it was less individual exhibitions that secured their legacy; rather, it was the mythology that aggregated around the individual personalities in the group. They were brilliant self-promoters. It was Souza who, at about this time, was famously censored for including a nude self-portrait in a Bombay gallery. The influential artist, Krishen Khanna would later report about the event: “As I walked up the stairs, I passed a rather well-dressed woman muttering to herself. At first I thought she was chanting a mantra, I listened more intently and heard her saying quite audibly: ‘Disgusting, absolutely disgusting’.”

If the landscape of art in India in the Fifties was dominated by artists of the PAG generation, by the early Sixties there was a new wave of young artists who wanted to differentiate themselves from what had come before. Group 1890 was formed in 1961 as an all-male affair, and held in its number artists such as J Swaminathan, Jeram Patel, Gulam Mohammed Sheikh, Himmat Shah and M Reddeppa Naidu. Their only exhibition was held in 1963 at Rabindra Bhavan, Delhi, and was inaugurated by then-prime minister, Jawaharlal Nehru, with a catalogue essay written by the great Mexican poet and diplomat Octavio Paz. Now that’s some serious star power. The group was to disintegrate soon after, but the Delhi outing had done enough to secure its position in exhibition history.

By the end of the Sixties, India was playing an increasingly active international role among politically non-aligned countries that resisted the pull of both the US and the USSR. It was at this time that a government-funded initiative was set up under the stewardship of writer and connoisseur Mulk Raj Anand: Triennale India. Here, the best of contemporary Indian art would be hung alongside the best of the West. The first edition took place in Delhi in 1968, with letters of support from such figures as the British intellectual John Berger. Yet within India, there were significant protests by many of the leading emerging and mid-career artists of the day. At the helm of these protests were a young art-world power couple, artist Vivan Sundaram and art theorist Geeta Kapur. Nancy Adajania, who has done more than anyone else to recover the history of the Triennale, explains that Kapur “identified mega exhibitions such as Triennale India as merely an extension of a network of famous international art exhibitions supported by the vested interests of ‘commercial art dealers’.”

Kapur and Sundaram would continue to be highly influential in the Indian art ecosystem throughout the Seventies; indeed, they were among the main instigators of A Place For People (1981, Bombay and Delhi). This exhibition was a deliberate rupture from the abstract art that preceded it, in India as well as globally. As the title suggests, the exhibiting artists in A Place For People were interested in exploring human relationships through figurative paintings that were rooted in a sense of the local. The final line- up of artists for the exhibition was Sudhir Patwardhan, Bhupen Khakhar, Jogen Chowdhury, Gulam Mohammed Sheikh, Nalini Malani and Sundaram. It was a veritable who’s who of emerging and established artists at that time.

Nalini Malani is among the country’s most senior artists (she will be accorded a full retrospective at the Centre Pompidou in 2017). I have had the honour of working with her on exhibitions, and know just how sharp her eye is for their design and layout. At 70, she has seen and participated in many of the most significant shows of the last half-century. A pioneer in creating multimedia artwork, her practice is rooted in the gendered experience. Apart from A Place For People, she singles out Through The Looking Glass (1987-1989) as groundbreaking, which comprised the work of four women artists: Madhvi Parekh, Nilima Sheikh, Arpita Singh and Malani herself. It’s hard to grasp the extent to which men dominated the art world at this time, not only in India but also abroad. Indeed, the seeds for Through The Looking Glass were laid in Malani’s mind during a trip to New York in 1979, where she had visited the AIR gallery, a space exclusively reserved for the presentation of artwork by women artists.

The early Noughties – the moment, incidentally, that I entered the gallery scene – saw Indian art irrevocably break out of narrow, domestic boundaries at the same time as artists often sought new mediums of expression, including video and installation-based work. This was also the era of the survey exhibition abroad: big, brash shows that tried to encapsulate everything about art made in India. Similar exhibitions were put on in regional museums throughout the Eastern part of Asia, Europe, Australasia and North America. At this time, Indian galleries had the world’s most important curators beating down our doors, to discover the latest hot ticket artist. Large-scale and immersive artworks were the order of the day, and so those artists that tended towards this, in non-traditional media, were favoured for these outings. The shows were often given strange, filmic titles, trapped somewhere between soft porn and Merchant Ivory productions: Edge Of Desire, Indian Highway, The Empire Strikes Back, Passage To India.

Up until the Nineties, there was little scholarly interest around the history of modern and contemporary Indian art, especially outside India. It’s only more recently that curators have reached back in time to pluck artists from relative obscurity and place them squarely on the international stage. This trend started with the major Guggenheim retrospectives for the abstract painter VS Gaitonde in 2015. Next was the exhibition of minimalist artist Nasreen Mohamedi (1937-1990), whose work my gallery has been showing for more than a decade, and whose first major retrospective was shown at the Kiran Nadar Museum of Art (KNMA) in Delhi (2014), before traveling to the Reina Sofia in Madrid (2015) and the Met Breuer in New York (2016).

The real lacuna in this list is the lack of more era-defining exhibitions in the country’s public institutions, particularly at the National Gallery of Modern Art (NGMA) in Delhi, or its regional outposts in Mumbai and Bengaluru. The NGMA’s recently retired director, Rajeev Lochan, belatedly initiated a spate of mid-career retrospectives for artists, beginning in 2010 with Anish Kapoor and later Subodh Gupta, Atul Dodiya, Raqs Media Collective, Mrinalini Mukherjee and Sudarshan Shetty. Next up is Jitish Kallat. Undoubtedly, the retrospective that has left the most lasting impression so far is Anish Kapoor’s. This sprawling presentation took on, as a satellite space, the enormous Mehboob Studio in Mumbai. In terms of its complexity and level of exhibition design, there have been very few other examples like it over the last 70 years.

The most recent and most ambitious series of exhibitions of art in India have been the first two editions of the Kochi-Muziris Biennale (KMB). Now looking towards its third edition, it has transformed the way that art is viewed in the country. With visitor numbers reaching into the hundred thousands, and curators flocking from around the world, this event has become a hotspot for those even with just a passing interest in art. The combination of unconventional exhibition spaces (granaries, forts, colonial bungalows) and thoughtfully curated artist groupings, showing in every conceivable media, has secured KMB on the world calendar of art events. If the biennale is anything to go by, the future of exhibitions in India looks exciting.

Words: Mortimer Chatterjee

Mortimer Chatterjee is the co-founder of Mumbai-based gallery Chatterjee and Lal. He’d like to thank Shanay Jhaveri, assistant curator of South Asian Art at The Met, artists Nalini Malani and Sudhir Patwardhan and collector Czaee Shah for their insights into India’s exhibition history.